Text Manipulation & Cut-up Technique Links

There are a lot of websites out there covering the Cut-up technique, especially with reference to William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. There are also a reasonable number of Cut-up engines and scripts, although some (for example, the one hosted by the now defunct NetMonkey online magazine, and Lee Worden’s Cut-up engine & website) have now sadly disappeared from the internet.

Online and Downloadable Cut-up Scripts

• WordPalette
  Destroy writer’s block forever. Creative writing meets the 21^st century - WordPalette is a cut-up app for iPhones & iPads, available from the Apple AppStore.
• Language is a Virus
  More Cut-up generators, text manipulators and Burroughs-inspired articles than you can shake a stick at.
• DadaDodo
  DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. The ANSI C source code is provided.
• When you run out of words
  The OutOfWords application creates new texts from a source text. The resulting text consists of “likely” words pairs from the source text.
• Generating Random Text
  Takes a block of text as input and works out the proportion of characters within the text according to a chosen order. Technically, this process is based on Markov chains.
• runme.org - say it with software art!
  A whole page of downloadable text manipulation software (mainly for Microsoft Windows).

Text Manipulation and Cut-up Information & Theory

• The ghost on the b-side
  Author Jeff Noon talking about how he uses the cut-up technique. In which he kindly says that our Text Mixing Desk is his favourite online cut-up engine.
• Can’t we writers have some fun as well?
  Article written in 2001 by author Jeff Noon for The Guardian: Film-makers use jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion. Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can’t we writers have some fun as well?
• WSB: the Cut-up Technique
  A detailed introduction of Cut-up from bigtable.com, a defunct William Burroughs site now only available on archive.org.
• William S. Burroughs and Cut-up
  Introduction to Burroughs-style cut-up from Legends magazine, now only available on archive.org..
• How to Jumpstart Your Creative Process with William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique
  From Open Culture.

Videos

William S. Burroughs on his Cut-Up Method of Writing

Interview conducted by John Walters for “Walters Week”. Broadcast November 11^th 1982.

Cut-up technique - David Bowie